Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Who does phone surveys anyway?

I'm a grateful reader of the FiveThirtyEight Blog, now hosted by the NY Times. They give everyone access to electoral data that was once available only the pros.

Of course their data is only as good as the phone survey. I've been wondering, lately, how well that is working.

We get quite a few "survey" calls. Some of them are surely legitimate, but others are ploys to raise money for campaigns. Some are probably "phishing" (identity theft) operations. Given the range of "survey" calls we get, it's not surprising that we never answer any of them. (In fact I never had time anyway, but Emily used to be more cooperative.)

So we're not surveyed.

So how common is our reaction? I know we're very peculiar in most things, but I would imagine that the fund raising tricks and phishing exploits must turn quite a few people off of surveys.

PS. We always tell them to take us off the call list, but I doubt that does anything. We're in the 'do not call' registry anyway.